


let me tell you a story about love

by cylencia



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Atsukita - freeform, Character Study, Existential Angst, Gen, M/M, Miya Atsumu Needs a Hug, Miya Atsumu-centric, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29842395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cylencia/pseuds/cylencia
Summary: Atsumu gives and gives andgives,because he doesn't know how to take.
Relationships: Miya Atsumu & Miya Osamu, Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Comments: 7
Kudos: 147





	let me tell you a story about love

Miya Atsumu is seven years old when he first falls in love.

Or so he thinks, but there’s only so much weight you can put in a seven-year-old’s idea of love. He has always heard the grown-ups talking about _love_ and all its wonders and the moment he sees her, he’s convinced that’s what it is, all logic be damned. 

The girl’s name is Rei and she has just moved in two doors down from him. She’s in high school and she sometimes comes over to babysit him and Osamu when their parents have to leave for work. 

The first time Atsumu had laid eyes on her, he was blown away. Dark hair flowing down her back in waves and a smile that could put sunflowers to shame. Even her eyes were the prettiest shade of… some colour that wasn’t in Atsumu’s vocabulary just yet. “You’re beautiful,” he had blurted out, because children his age are not bound by insignificant things like pride or reluctance or common sense, least of all dishonesty.

She had laughed lightly, a sound Atsumu likens to wind chimes to this day, and bent down a little to ruffle his hair. “Thank you, Atsumu-kun, that’s very sweet of you. You’re quite the looker yourself!”

“Really!?” Atsumu’s seven-year-old heart had jumped fifty feet in his chest before he had composed it and tried again.”Uhm, I mean, better than my brother?”

She had chuckled. “Definitely.”

Atsumu didn’t stop bragging about that until everyone had heard it a hundred times, in a hundred different ways, and _‘yes, Atsumu, we know you’re the Rei-san certified, prettier Miya twin’_ and _‘yes, Atsumu, we know you’re her favourite, for the love of God, please stop.’_ but when has he ever listened?

So when Rei moves away two years later, Atsumu feels like his world just came crashing down, because _no_ , this isn’t how it was supposed to go and he didn’t want her to go away, not when he still had flowers (weeds) he had picked from the backyard to give to her and so many things he still had to tell her. _‘I got better marks than ‘Samu on a test!’_ and _‘you’re beautiful x2’_ and _‘the plant on my windowsill died’_ and _‘I love you… I think’_.

He cries until his eyes are puffy and his nose red, and he doesn’t stop crying until his mother suggests that he write a letter to Rei. So, with copious use of crayons and colour pencils, he puts his whole heart into crafting the perfect letter to confess his feelings. 

Two minutes later, because he's impatient like that, he gives up, realizing that he doesn’t know nearly enough kanji to write half the things he wants to say.

Two days later, because he's only seven years old and doesn't really know anything, he has forgotten all about his broken heart and insurmountable grief.

* * *

Miya Atsumu is in his second year of high school when he realizes, with a silent, stomach-dropping _oh shit,_ that he’s in love with Kita Shinsuke. Osamu tells him with a long-suffering sigh that it was about time he realized because he was tired of ‘watching ya wither and pine away every time Kita-san enters the room.’ Atsumu tells him, very kindly, to take his opinion and shove it up where the sun doesn’t shine.

He doesn’t make a secret of his feelings. He doesn’t really know _how_ , to be honest, not when they’re so intense that it feels like he’s drowning on dry land. Kita comes and goes like the wind, easy and graceful and so _free_ that Atsumu isn’t sure how he can ever bring himself to follow. Perhaps it’s the way everything about him screams well-earned confidence and elegance—unreachable, untouchable, _unachievable_ —or maybe it’s how he never wavers, always knowing just what to say and what to do. 

Most of all, though, it’s the way he looks at Atsumu, as if he’s something more than just a boy wonder, more than just a bag of ‘potential’. As if he’s something that deserves to be handled with care too.

On the day that the third years graduate, Atsumu feels like there’s a hole where his stomach should be, his chest feeling emptier than the volleyball gym he leaves behind when he finally goes home at half-past eleven. There are identical looks of pity in the eyes of everyone he speaks to, pity for him, and he hates it, he _hates_ being pitied. But if he’s being honest, he does feel pretty pathetic.

He stays after the ceremony to congratulate his upperclassmen, and perhaps that’s a bad idea, perhaps he should just go home so it would stop feeling like his heart is being ripped out of his chest, but he can’t. Not before seeing him. 

Kita looks beautiful. He has always looked kind of ethereal to Atsumu, like he’s just slightly out of place among commoners like him but he looks especially breathtaking right now, in the pressed black suit and a tie to match the colour of his hair, evening sunlight glinting off the cover of the shiny new diploma in his hand. He too has the same look of pity in his eyes as the others, looking at Atsumu in that very specific, very frustrating way—as if he’s the aftermath of a tragedy. Briefly, Atsumu is seized by a wave of panic, because _oh god, he knows, he Knows, how does he—_ but he forces himself to swallow it down because, really, what does it matter now? 

The other third years have gone off ahead to celebrate, leaving him and Kita alone for the precious few moments they have before he’d have to go too, and he wants to say something, damn it, he has so _much_ to say but the moment Kita’s eyes fix on him, Atsumu forgets his own name.

“I… Kita-san, I… “

Kita smiles at him, small and soft and _knowing_ in a way that makes Atsumu’s stomach lurch. “Atsumu-kun,” he says and all at once, every single noise in Atsumu’s head quiets down to listen. “It’s okay.”

Atsumu is on the verge of ripping his hair out. _No, it’s not fucking ‘okay’_ , he wants to scream, _because you’re leaving and my chest feels like it’s full of spikes and I don’t know what to do with all of these stupid feelings now and I—_

The lump in his throat is making it harder to breathe and when Kita’s hand comes up to brush gently against his cheek, he almost lets out a choked sound. It dies under the watery caramel of his senpai's eyes.

“Be well… Atsumu.”

When Kita walks away that night, he takes a part of Atsumu’s heart with him, tucked safely into the pocket of his suit. It doesn’t even occur to Atsumu that he’s allowed to ask for it back.

* * *

Miya Atsumu is eighteen years old when he begrudgingly accepts that maybe volleyball isn’t the _only_ thing he loves more than life. There is one more strong contender in the form of the bane of his existence, his annoying, insufferable identical twin.

It was only a few weeks ago that Osamu had told him he was quitting volleyball after high school, and only a few days since they had returned back to speaking terms. Their own graduation day looms on the horizon and he doesn’t want to part with Osamu on such a bitter note—he doesn’t want to part with him at all but he had always known they’d have to diverge at some point. They’re two different people, after all. Even so, he had never thought it would be like this.

(If you were to ask him how he _had_ imagined it going, how he had imagined parting from his brother, he wouldn’t have been able to answer. Luckily, Atsumu has never been one to think about such things, because out of sight, out of mind, no?)

That said, some things really can’t be taken back once they’ve been said.

_When you’re dead, I’ll tell you, ‘see? I was happier than you!’_

He doesn’t know what had come over him to say something like that, to _Osamu_ of all people, and the thorns that have been lodged in his throat ever since he said it can neither go down nor come up. So, he’s left to rip and claw at his own neck, at his chest, at his heart, wishing it would stop burning, stop _hurting, stop goddamnit—_

“Fine. Guess you’ll tell me when I’m dead, then.”

_Nothing_ had ever hurt so much. And yet, he knew it was nowhere close to the amount of hurt he had already hurled at his brother. Atsumu deserved every punch, every jab, every poison-laced word Osamu had to throw at him. Which is why it hurt that much more when Osamu said nothing after that.

They graduate soon after and a few weeks later, when Atsumu is done packing, he considers storming up to wherever Osamu is and shouting until he feels better but is beaten to the punch. Osamu doesn’t shout, however. In fact, he doesn’t say anything at all even now. Just comes to sit down beside where Atsumu is sitting on the floor of their childhood bedroom with his back to the wall, labelled cardboard boxes in front of them. When he leans his head sideways, Atsumu meets him halfway and right there amongst the past eighteen years of their life cluttered around them, they sit in silence, breathings synchronized on reflex. 

Why, why, _why_ can’t he ever say something when it matters? Why is it that whenever he does say anything, it’s always the wrong one? 

Next morning, on the train bound from Hyogo to Tokyo, Atsumu clenches his fists so tight that he draws blood, leaving crescent indents on his palms. And if each successive mile away from home, away from unresolved mistakes and contrite gazes and unsaid apologies feels like a tightening chokehold on his neck, well… he can deal with that later.

* * * 

Miya Atsumu is twenty-one years old and the starting setter for the MSBY Black Jackals when he tells himself to get his shit together and just fucking _say_ it for once. All his life, he has been running after people and things and goals and people he loves, close, _so_ close, but never quite close enough to touch, always slipping through his fingers just when he thinks he’s got it. 

He’s been on this godforsaken earth for more than two decades and he decides that he’s not going to let his list of ‘the ones that got away’ keep growing. Not again, never again and especially not this time.

“Nice game, Miya-san!” Hinata chirps. “Your sets were amazing today!”

“My sets are always amazing, but thanks, Shouyou-kun!”

They’re going out to celebrate yet another win for the Jackals but Atsumu’s looking for someone else and _oh, there he is and he looks amazing and how the hell does he look so beautiful all the damn time and—_

He takes a deep breath to calm the shuddering of his heart and reminds himself _not again, never again. He’s not letting go before trying._

“Omi-kun!”

Sakusa stops in his tracks, right at the gate of the building from where he was leaving with everyone else, and looks back at him, an eyebrow raised in question.

Atsumu doesn’t let it discourage him. Instead, he approaches him, a blindingly bright grin on his face. “Go out for a drink with me?”

Sakusa gives him a deadpan look. “We.. are going out for drinks, Miya, as far as I’m aware. Right now. With everyone else.”

Atsumu wants to throw himself off a bridge. Instead, he takes a step back, takes a shuddering inhale, and tries again. “That’s not… _quite_ what I meant, Omi-kun.” _You know that._

“I know that,” Sakusa replies, “I was giving you a chance to back off on your own.”

_Back off on my own? What kind of—_

Atsumu has made a lot of mistakes in his life. He loves too intensely and pines too harshly, he feels too much of everything and he doesn’t know when to let go—or _how_ to let go, for that matter—and he wants, he wants, he wants _so much_ of _so many_ things he’s sure he doesn’t deserve and yet, for all of that… 

For all of that, he’s still too selfless to hurt anyone but himself.

Even so, for once in his life, he wants to allow himself to _want_ , to allow himself to ask without feeling guilty for it.

So, he scratches the back of his neck and smiles. “Yeah, well, I’m very persistent.”

Kiyoomi rolls his eyes. “A stubborn asshole is what you are.”

“Granted,” Atsumu winces. But then he smiles again, softer, brighter somehow, and despite already being still, Kiyoomi halts once more. “So, drink?”

* * *

_" let me tell you a story about love, and the boy who finally allowed himself to take."_

**Author's Note:**

> kudos/comments are the writer's driving force. come scream at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/cylencia) or [tumblr.](https://lawliette.tumblr.com)


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